Is it my own stiff, often achy, healing, dying body that makes me so sympathetic to the suffering of the natural world? How do I say, clearly show, that we are unified by our uniqueness? One in many skins? I knew the pain of that poor raccoon, yesterday, in my own flesh and bone and blood. I knew that a part of me, too, hobbled along in that suffering animal.

Kat Duff writes in The Alchemy of Illness, "In the third year of my illness, I dreamed that I went to volunteer at a local hospital and the people there sent me to work in the "dead babies department," to talk to the grief-stricken parents and make prayers for all the babies who have died. When I woke up, I made that prayer, for the part of me that left or died when I was molested as a baby, and for all babies dying, or only partially surviving, of starvation, disease, abuse, neglect, or war. Sometimes I still make that prayer. I am intrigued by the fact that my dream instructed me to pray, and to pray not only for my lost child, but for all lost children; in so doing, I feel the sacredness of my being and of all other beings simultaneously, and come to see the universality of my experience. It feels as though the thin strand of my life is woven back into the web of our world. That may be the answer to my question of how to encompass the painful contradictions and injustices of life." (132)

The thin strand of each individual life woven into the web of our world.

What color and quality of strand am I? You?

Every springtime I am astonished anew. By how fast the growth and change happens. By how restless and enervated I feel. By the harsh realities of survival. In three days the dogwood have sprung from tight bud to open blossom. Narcissus are suddenly in full bloom. I am astonished.